THE ALLEGED ATTACK ON FREE SPEECH. IN OXFORD.
Q0 astonishing are the allegations made in a part k..3 of the Press about the action of the Vice- Chancellor of Oxford in sending down Mr. Reade and Mr. Gray (one because he was editor and the other because he was assistant editor of a paper called Free Oxford), that one wonders whether they can possibly be accurate. If they are, the Vice-Chancellor seems to be conducting the affairs of his University on lines which would make it appear even more mediaeval than any of the buildings or historical monument& Subject to the reservation that there may be some inaccuracy, or that there was ground for action more specific than that which has been made public even in the Vice-Chancellor's own letter to the Times, we must say that the Vice-Chancellor appears to have made a bungle of a trivial or tiresome incident. It is, of course, absurd to talk about " an attack upon free speech." That is wholly beyond the power of any Vice-Chancellor. There is ample protection in this matter provided by the ordinary law. Anybody can say what he likes in Oxford by the simple process of withdrawing himself from the jurisdiction of the University. No doubt that may involve hardship on a man who wishes to have the advantages of an Oxford degree, but, at any rate, free speech is safe. Further, we are quite prepared to admit, though we have never seen a copy of Free Oxford, that the doctrines preached were bad in themselves, may have been set forth in a provocative way, and may have been likely to provoke controversies which those who want to see Oxford remain a place of learning and of education rather than of political polemics would regard as undesirable in themselves and as calculated to injure the peace of Oxford.
But, even if all these admissions are made, and in the fullest way, it appears to us that the Vice-Chancellor has made an unhappy mistake. Young men at Oxford are quite as keen as those in any other place on the globe, or perhaps we might almost say keener than those in any other place on the globe, to satisfy themselves as to the soundness of current views and theories—social and ethical. What the young hate, and rightly hate, is to be told to take things on trust. They want to test them and prove them for themselves. They hate to rely upon the word of somebody else in regard to what they rightly realize are the most important things in the world.
Surely those who are responsible for their education ought, in the first place, to be well pleased that the persons they are to teach adopt this attitude. It is the foundation of all true education. The person who wants to learn, and who is, therefore, worth teaching, should have " Why ? " " How ? " and " What is the use of ? " always on his lips. Nothing is more hopeless than to attempt to teach people who never challenge anything, but only "learn by rote. Whether repression of ideas can ever be right may be an arguable matter, but certainly the last place for such repression is a University. A University is an intellectual laboratory where every mental substance imaginable should be brought to be tested and treated and thus made intelligible. Who would ever dream of putting materials for investigation on an index of forbidden things—putting them outside the range of discussion, not merely in working hours but even in the undergraduates' own time ? The notion must be abhorrent to all who care for true learning. In the matter of social and political opinion every view must be considered on its merits and all sides should be heard and weighed.
No doubt those who are responsible for directing education at a University are anxious that the learner shall adopt the good views and the sound views, and that the bad, erroneous or fallacious views shall fail to make lodgment in young minds. But the way to kill bad opinions, as all the world knows, is not to repress them but to bring them to the light, submit them to strict' tests, and then to let them die of their own want of vitality. The man who is told in the abstract that ho is not to consider this or that opinion, and is ordered to take on trust the assurance" either that there is nothing in the said opinion or else that it is harmful, very rightly and properly begins to wonder whether the allegation is true. If he knows anything, he knows enough to know how fallible personal opinion is apt to be. One half of history is a record of the mistakes made in politics, sociology and theology by well-meaning men. Progress, on the other hand, is almost always shown to have come from those who challenged received opinions and proved that they did not rest on reality or reason. The convincing teacher is he who says : " I am not going to ask you to take it from me that this or that doctrine is wrong. I am going to teach you how to test it for yourselves, and to learn whether it is true ox false. But in order to do this you must study the matter and make yourselves fully acquainted with it in all its bearings. Therefore, I ask you to hear all sides and judge accordingly. Learn the facts accurately and then draw the necessary conclusions. But to feel sure of the facts you must hear the other side."
Take the case. of Revolution, which happens to be the one in question. It is of the greatest possible importance that men and women at Oxford should not only understand what revolutionaries are driving at, but should learn how to answer their allega- tions, by showing that knowledge of their opponents' case which is the only true and lasting form of refutation. But how is it possible to do that unless they listen to and study what revolutionaries are saying ? Therefore, every opponent of bad sociology, bad economy, bad politics ought to insist on the advocates of these things being given a full and free opportunity to state their case. That is the only way to prevent men in later life being told : " Ali ! you have never heard our case: You have made a man of straw, which, of course, you can easily knock over. But the true arguments you never heard because they were suppressed. Further, they were suppressed for the very reason that if they had been heard they would have convinced you." That is often an untrue plea, but it cannot be met, unfortunately, if, as a matter of fact, there was suppression of opinion.
Does anyone now suppose that the manufacture of that ridiculous and somewhat ungracious figure, the juvenile Atheist, was prevented by Shelley being sent down from Oxford because he would not recant his opinions or under- take not to propagate them ? Of course, there was no such prevention. Instead, we may be quite sure that a good many people who had never heard the arguments of the Atheist, or till then had not wanted to hear them, at once began to inquire about them and to think that there must he something in them if the authorities were so vehemently opposed to their pro- pagation. Mark a thing " forbidden," shut up a door, lock a bookcase, and you will at once make all young people desire to find out for themselves whether the forbidden object is good, bad, or indifferent. If, instead of being sent down, Shelley had been allowed complete freedom of statement, his views—dragged to the light of day and tested—would have proved exceedingly dry, unprofitable and unstimuiating to the minds of most young men. As a rule, there is nothing more tedious than the discourse . of the unpersecuted but propagandist unbeliever. It requires the " sauce " of tyranny, or alleged tyranny, to make it go down. Perhaps it will be said that, .though it may be right not to interfere with a man's private opinions, he ought not to be allowed to preach them to persons with unedu- cated, immature, or over-sensitive minds. We cannot agree. No doubt one would like to shelter the tender and undeveloped mind from all sorts of sophisms, but the way to do it is not to use repression, but to substitute good arguments for bad arguments. Itis by teaching people to distinguish thin ice and rotten ice from sound ice that we make river and lake skating safe. In any case, nothing can be more reprehensible than trying to force a man to say that he will not proselytize—i.e., try to pass on his views of the truth. It is obvious that if a man is a good man and a sincere man, as those responsible for his education must above all other things want him to be, he dare not undertake not to express his views openly. .He would be a sinner and a hypocrite of the worst kind if, knowing the truth, he would, out of fear or selfishness, promise not to impart it to others. That is the kind of person whom there is, oddly enough, some ground for banishing from a place of education. After all, what is education but an attempt to light in men's minds a spiritual flame which will guide them in the true path, not merely of know- ledge, but of conduct ? But you cannot guide anyone by blowing out the light or by throwing a blanket over it. What ought to be do w, but what it is unfortu- nately often very difficult to`ao, is first to light the flame and then to teach people how to maintain it. Sometimes the flame will burn badly or dangerously ; but, anyway, it is better than smutty darkness. The smoky, ill-smelling flame of the most blatant of Atheists, or the most anarchical and idiotic of revolutionaries, is far better than the damp, cold clod of imbecile self-satisfaction from which it is impossible to raise the tiniest spark.
".But," it will be said, " is there to be no discipline in our Universities I Will you not even allow the authorities to say that this or that form of activity distracts the men's minds from work, and that therefore the sowers of distraction must be sent elsewhere ? " The proper reply seems to us to be that discipline must be maintained, and that if a man, say, of extreme Communistic views proceeds to action he will naturally and rightly be sent down. If he directly organizes open rebellion or incites to murder he might very properly be warned off the premises. So long, however, as it is only a question of opinion, and opinion however bad, he should be tolerated in his University as a useful educational instrument. There may be a point where his talk and his teachings might lead to a breach of the peace, but then the offender should be dealt with as the sensible law of England deals with the men who make life intolerable for their neighbours, not merely by their opinions, but by putting up blasphemous or indecent pictures or posters dealing with subjects which are sacred to the majority of their fellow-citizens. The right to one's own opinions is like the right to one's own property. It must be enjoyed in such a way as not to infringe the rights of others. For the application of this principle no strict rules can be laid down. Each case has to be dealt with by itself. The Vice-Chancellor, in his letter to the Times, said that Free Oxford advocated " the Red Terror." But that advocacy, coming from heady young visionaries or fanatics, is not the same thing in the eyes of sensible and tolerant men as any particular advocacy of assassination. If the doctrine of assassination was set forth in a manner dangerous to the community the young men ought at once to have been dealt with by the police. Oxford undergraduates are not immune from the ordinary law. Apparently, however, the young men who have been sent down were only writing and editing what we, and most sensible men, should regard as poisonous rubbish. But the way to stop such rubbish becoming a nuisance and breeding a plague is to bring it to the light, and to let the sun get at it; not to drive it underground or to enclose it in a cesspool in which there is neither ventilation nor opportunity of disinfection by the sunlight. When will people learn the very sound maxim that a man has a right to be wrong ? Of course he has. If not, free will would be a farce. The only way to get an individual to distinguish what is good . from what is bad is to begin by showing him that you mean to do him justice, that is, that you admit his right to be, as you think, in the wrong. We are ashamed of putting all this elementary stuff before our readers, and the present writer is still more ashamed of having to do it in connexion with Oxford. We do not want to say harsh things to the Vice-Chan- cellor, but we would ask him to reflect whether he is not humiliating Oxford before the world by taking action which leads to the University being pilloried by the sensationalist Press.
Remember, too, that the Vice-Chancellor appears to have looked for trouble. It would be quite justifiable that a man's College authorities should say to him • " We don't care what your opinions are, and you have a right to talk about them as much as you like, provided always that in editing "yo po paper or preaching to your friends you are not making impossible that education which we have undertaken to give you. We are not going to suppress opinion, but we are going to prevent you wasting your time while you are here. Therefore, you will either temporarily give up your editorship or go down." But, as we under- stand the case, the College authorities, who are the people responsible for the way in which an undergraduate spends his time, are not the people who have taken action. It is the Vice-Chancellor who has moved in this case. He, though responsible for the general tone of the University, is not responsible for the work of the undergraduates. If the Dons at Balliol were satisfied with Mr. Gray's work, and held that he had not wasted his time, then it seems to us that the Vice-Chancellor had no cause to intervene. Oxford has two great functions. It is a place of learning and a place of education. Anything that interferes with these functions must be checked, or, if necessary, removed. There are no other grounds whatever on which the powers of the University can be rightly invoked to deprive men of the opportunity of learning how to humanize their views and how to seize the truth that shall make them free.
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